Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 27.09.2020 20:31, Bob Newell wrote:
> In your long posting with many ideas about making Emacs
> beginner friendly, there is much to consider, and I must say
> right at the start that easing the Emacs learning experience
> is a worthy goal.
>
> It does raise the question: how did the current Emacs users
> learn Emacs? I can't speak for anyone else but I don't know
> that my own experiences are in any way unique. I learned first
> from the tutorial, then from some of the manuals, then by doing
> and experimenting and reading more of the manuals, and trial
> and error.

I don't remember too much, but:

- I went through the manual a few times. Was also puzzled why the 
trivial functionality (exotic bindings for regular editing commands) 
needs several pages of instruction, and why the tutorial tells very 
little about things that would make Emacs more useful than 
Nano/Notepad/etc. After that, I avoided the "Emacs" bindings anyway for 
a couple of years by using cua-mode, arrow keys, etc (not sure in which 
exact order), then eventually migrated to the default bindings except 
for 'undo'.

- I started not with the default configuration but with the "starter 
kit" by Phil Hagelberg. Its latest iteration lives at 
https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/better-defaults. Check out the rationale 
in the description, too (it's pretty accurate).

> We can never forget something critically important: Emacs is a
> very sophisticated, very powerful tool, and like all such
> tools, it takes effort and dedication to learn. (Even lesser
> tools, like office suites, take effort to learn, if perhaps in
> lesser amounts.)
>
> While we can and should do all we can to make the road
> smoother--- short of turning Emacs into something completely
> different and so overwhelmed with tooltips, popups, and other
> "help" that it becomes unpleasant or even unusable--- let's
> face it, Emacs is never going to be "easy."

I don't think it become too similar to VS Code (and friends) by default 
anytime soon.

But at least it could start giving off a more "polished" impression, 
both in the UI and the introduction documentation. So that, even to an 
uninitiated person (but someone with a compatible mindset, perhaps) it 
would look like a worthy investment of their time.

> Things are, in fact, very much easier now than when I started
> with Emacs decades ago. Today, there is a wealth of on-line
> information, with tutorials, how-tos, discussions, code
> samples, and help readily available to anyone who asks
> politely.

That is true.